I posted the start of this on 29/12/2015 as "Opener for First Chance" & invited comments.  So far, I've had no luck with that but hey, I know you're busy.  Here's the next part and, if you have any comments you wish to share, please feel free...

I’m Will, by the way.  William Alexander Peyton to be formal.  Most people know me as Will but Megan has always called me ‘Red’, for reasons which are obvious unless I’m wearing a hat.  I’m thirty-four, around six foot one and I can handle myself in a fight.  You can probably chalk that up to long years in the school playground, learning to defend myself from evil bastards who saw my red hair as a red flag until I convinced them they’d picked a fight they couldn’t win.  My nose ended up a bit crooked but it suffered less damage than most of the ginger bashers did.  I guess I’ve got a temper to go with the hair.

Megan... well, Megan is a whole other thing.   If you saw her, you’d say she was beautiful and she is, she really is, but that’s not her defining feature.  That would be her complete and utter lack of fear.  Where you or I might hesitate, Megan jumps right in.  Now, you could say that’s a good thing - life belongs to the brave and all that.  But we hesitate for a reason.  It’s a survival skill.  A sensible amount of caution allows us to regroup, withdraw and fight another day.  At the very least, it gives us a chance to weigh up the odds.  With Megan, the odds are firmly stacked against you at the start and your main priority is to prevent her getting herself killed before she reaches her target.  Hanging on to your own skin is also a major concern.  Make no mistake - between Megan and a heat-seeking missile there’s not a whole lot of difference and God help anyone who’s around when the explosion happens.

You might say Megan is her father’s daughter.   I’ve said it myself but I’m not sure it’s the whole truth.  Eliot Chance is, without doubt, the coldest hearted bastard you are likely to meet this side of Christmas and, believe me, I’ve met a few.  He founded Chance Associates, a high-end security firm based in Mayfair and that location pretty much defines his clientele.  They are loaded.  Whatever they want, they have the means to buy it or to pay someone to get it for them.  Which is where Eliot’s firm comes in.  Protection, kidnap negotiation, blackmailing employee or abusive spouse - whatever the problem, Chance Associates can provide a solution.  For a price.  Megan has learned a lot from her father and she’s being groomed to inherit the family business.  If she survives him, that is.  And that is really my problem with Eliot Chance.  He’ll protect any deadbeat member of some billionaire’s family but he doesn’t protect his own daughter.  Just as he failed to protect his own wife.

I don’t know the details.  I guess, in his business, it pays not to advertise failure.  I heard Megan’s mother died in some botched kidnap switch when Megan was sixteen.  I didn’t know her when her mother was alive but I’m guessing that Miranda Chance’s death might have something to do with Megan’s kamikaze attitude to life.  You sure as hell can feel Death standing at Megan’s shoulder when you get involved in one of her hair-brained ventures.  Maybe she just doesn’t care if she survives or not.  My problem is - I do care.  I care a lot.  Which is why I needed to hand off my caffeine deficient commuters to another barista and scoot after Megan.

The only problem with that was Rachel, my business partner and actual boss of the coffee shop, Impresso, who had spotted Megan and was shooting me a look guaranteed to sizzle small insects.
‘Don’t you dare, Will’ she hissed, between customers.  ‘There will not be a job to come back to if you follow that evil bitch.’
Which I knew was an empty threat.  You see, I part own the coffee shop, although, I’ve got to admit, Rachel does all the serious work: ordering supplies, serving commuters from 7am to 7 pm and hiring and firing.  But she couldn’t actually fire me.  I hoped.
‘Sorry, Rache... You know how it is... I’ve got to...’

I tried a conciliatory smile which just earned me a more intense glare combined with a scowl which would have made Medusa proud.  It didn’t matter.  Whatever Megan was up to, I couldn’t leave her to it.  Those green eyes had looked more than serious.  They’d looked scared.  Which was a first.  I have never once seen Megan look frightened, even at moments when I was reduced to babbling terror.  Whatever this was about, Megan needed back up.
​
Several customers took a step back as Rachel’s glare scythed through the crowd and I could feel it burning into the small of my back as I left the coffee shop and hurried after Megan, out into the street.  I knew I was being an idiot.  I knew I was going to regret it.  But I also knew Megan was in serious trouble and I might be able to help.

You have a story to tell.  Maybe your story is already plotted out in your head with every plot point in place and every character arc mapped.  Maybe you just plan to start writing and see how things go.  Either way, you have a decision to make: where do you begin?

All stories, we are told, need a beginning, a middle and an end. It sounds simple.  Yet starting the story can be one of the most difficult decisions a writer makes.  A poor start might mean a potential reader never travels past that first sentence.  A brilliant start can hook the reader and propel them into the story, eager to know more.  The start of your story matters.  The stakes are high.

Storytellers have been struggling with this problem since stories began.  Sometimes the answer was to come up with a phrase which was repeated so often it became a cliché: “Once upon a time...” or “A long time ago...”  Neither of these tell us anything about the story to come.  They are simply ways of alerting us to the fact that a story is about to be told.  They are a call for our attention but are now so over familiar that they no longer engage us.  Unless there is a twist.

The standard opening to Star Wars gives us an interesting twist:
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...”
The story is set in the past, which is a surprise as it concerns space ships and robots and galactic empire, all things we associate with tales of the future.  So this traditional opener is given a new life and we are hooked.

The opening to Shrek gives us a similar twist.  It starts with a book where we read the opening line  to so many fairy tales:
“Once upon a time there was a lovely princess...”
We all know how that story goes.  The hero kills the ogre and marries the princess.  But this fairy tale, we quickly learn, is told from the ogre’s point of view.  If he is the hero, the story is not going to follow the recipe that we have come to expect.  Again, our curiosity is piqued and we want to know more.  Another successful hook.

What does this tell us?  A reader does not want a predictable opening.  A reader is looking for something different, for something to make reading your story worth their time.  So your opening has to be a promise of a fascinating story to come.  Anything less is a waste of ink.
​
How to achieve this?  One method is to set up an expectation and then give it a twist, exactly like the examples above.  George Orwell’s opening to 1984 is a masterpiece at subverting our expectations:
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
We know about clocks.  We know they never strike thirteen.  We’re hooked.

J M Barrie’s opening to Peter Pan begins:
"All children, except one, grow up."
This gives the reader a double whammy.  It confounds our expectations that all children grow up and sets up questions in the reader’s mind.  Who is this child?  Why does he or she never grow up?  Openings that set up a question in the reader’s mind always work well because, if there is a question, the reader will want to read on to discover the answers.

Actually, Peter Pan’s opening is a triple whammy - it not only plants a question and messes with our expectations, it also introduces the major character.  Introducing a main character in the opening is an effective way to bond the reader to that person’s story.  C S Lewis opens The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with:
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
The author simultaneously introduces Eustace and alerts us to the fact that he is not a nice boy.  We are intrigued.  Who is he and why is an unpleasant person given prominence at the start of the story?  More questions.  More reasons to read on.

Charles Dickens’ opening to A Christmas Carol goes further, by introducing us to a character who is no longer alive:
“Marley was dead, to begin with.”
The reader not only wants to know who he is and why he is important to the story but is also being primed for the key element of the tale: the dead will return, as a ghost, to haunt the main character.  Another twist.

If you are stuck for a really great beginning to your story, you could do worse than play around with one of these ideas.
Create a twist, subvert reader expectations.
Set up a question the reader wants answering.
Introduce a main character and give the reader a reason to root for or to dislike that person.

If you can create an opening which does all three and gives a sense of imminent doom then you’ve got a zinger of an opening:
“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.”
Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club.
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Now all you need to do is write the story to go with it.  Good luck!

​It’s the end of the first Matrix film and Neo has reached a new level of being.  Instead of seeing the manufactured ‘reality’ around him, he can see the endless lines of computer code which create that reality.  He has evolved to read the structure which underpins his reality.

We’re not Neo, nor are we living in a computer simulation (no matter what the conspiracy theorists would have us believe).  But, as writers, we must start to see the ‘code’ which underlies every successful story so that we can make use of it to improve our own writing.

By code, I do not mean computer code but the structural elements which make stories work.  For stories are not just a random series of events.  Stories have shape and purpose and meaning so that they create a convincing and ultimately satisfying alternative reality for the reader.  Without this, the reader drifts, grows bored and, inevitably, stops reading.  A writer’s worst nightmare!

To enthral and engage, a story requires elements which will reach out and grab the reader so that s/he does not want to stop reading.  Any storyteller needs an armoury of such devices and must be ready to employ them at intervals throughout the story.  But, if they are too obvious, the magic is broken.  The reader sneers and turns away.  No, like Neo’s computer code, these elements must be integrated into the story so seamlessly that an inattentive reader may not even notice they are there.  But you, the writer, must learn to recognise when and how and why these elements are employed.

What are these magical elements?  These hooks which will bind the reader to your story?  Every genre has its own particular favourites.  Unrequited love in a romance.  Who murdered X? in a crime novel.  The race against time in a thriller.  All setting up an anxiety in the reader’s mind and the desire to know how things turn out.

There are other elements, less genre specific.  A favourite across many genres is: The Reversal.  The reader is led to suppose that one thing is true and then the opposite is revealed as the truth.  Agatha Christie uses this one all the time.  Possible spoiler alert: In the interests of not spoiling things too much, I will not be specific about which books she uses these devices in but, if you don’t want to know, please hop on to the next paragraph!  Agatha writes of the sequence of murders which actually conceal one, specific murder; of the murder not done by one but many killers; of the sidekick to the detective who is actually the murderer.

But reversals are just as useful in other genres.  Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, sets up a brilliant one when she makes her two protagonists dislike each other before revealing that, in fact, they are a perfect match.  This works particularly well because she is not simply fooling the reader.  She makes her characters believe that they dislike one another.  They, too, are fooled into believing one thing and then have to switch mindset when they discover that the opposite is true.  Even better, several characters (Lizzie’s own father among them) are resistant to believing the new truth.  How true to life that is.  How clever the reader is made to feel because they now have a superior insight into the truth!  If you have ever flicked back through the pages of a book to reread passages in the light of a later discovery, chances are you’ve been hooked by a clever reversal.

A ‘ticking clock’ is another element of story telling which can transcend genres.  I have already mentioned its use in a thriller but any story can be energised with a simple time critical element.  Cinderella’s midnight chimes is a classic example.  The time limit in the film High Noon is another.  Back to Pride and Prejudice and we find a ticking clock in the race to find Lydia and Wickham after their unfortunate elopement - will the couple be found before the scandal breaks?  Can they be made to marry and so save her good name?

The classic ‘ticking clock’ is the countdown we see on screen as the bomb is discovered.  In reality, bomb makers do not feel a need to add a literal ticking clock but, in film, it is now a requirement.  James Bond films depend upon it for their box office takings.  Mission Impossible even incorporated a ‘ticking clock’ into its credits with the lit fuse searing its way across the screen.  And who can forget ‘This tape will self-destruct in 10 seconds’?

American episodic TV is particularly good at demonstrating these kind of story elements which hook a viewer.  They have to be good at it because in the USA ratings are all.  My favourite reversal is in the first ever episode of Scrubs, the medical sitcom, where the nervous new medical students discover that the ‘nice’ doctor is absolutely not interested in teaching them anything.  It’s the grumpy, angry doctor who is doing his best to make them understand what they have to do and be and become if they’re going to make it as doctors.  The one they’re all terrified off turns out to be the one who cares that they succeed.

 So, the next time you think you’ll give up on writing and try a little recreational TV - look out for the ways in which the episode lures you in and keeps you watching.  And, once you’ve spotted the ‘code’, have a think about how you could use it to add that magic element of ‘must keep reading’ to your writing.  And, like Neo, you will start to manipulate your fictional reality to suit your own purposes.

​Good luck and happy writing!